A Look Ahead to 2014 On This Blog

With 2013 rapidly drawing to a close I just want to thank everybody who has read this blog and supported my work. I’ve invested a lot of hours in this blog and while I don’t earn money directly from my content here, the work I’ve done has been noticed by some very cool people and opened up some great opportunities for me. That wouldn’t have been possible without your readership and frequent words of encouragement and I genuinely appreciate that.

The idea of using statistical methods to evaluate and pick fights is still a work in progress and I made great strides this year. I finished #17 overall in the Sherdog pick’em contest and will be looking to improve on that ranking in 2014. Since I started this blog my methods have evolved a lot and I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way. With that in mind I’m confident that my analysis will improve further next year.

Because the UFC is going to promote events almost every week in 2014, I’m going to have to make changes in the way I cover each event. As much as I enjoy covering each fight, writing individual reports is very time-consuming. If all I had to do was write the posts it wouldn’t be too bad, but proper breakdowns of each fight require a real quantitative analysis for fighters who have a lot of data to work with, and attentive tape study for fighters whose careers are still getting started. Already I have been forced to cut corners far too often when I write about every fight. With events happening so frequently in the future I am going to a different type of fight coverage.

I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to work with Jason Somerville and produce MMA content for his website. I will continue to write fight previews for main events and some co-main events at JasonSomerville.com, along with some stats-focused research.

On this blog I’m going to move away from individual fight predictions and focus instead on each event as a whole. I plan on doing statistical recaps on each fight card along with some impressions on how the outcomes affect each fighter moving forward. I will also spend more time looking at my FPR statistic – I believe FPR is a great way to estimate how each fighter stacks up among his peers; I need to do a better job of communicating exactly what FPR is and why it matters.

In addition I plan on producing more win probability estimates for each fight and expanding my “degenerate gambling” commentary for each fight card. So while the UFC coverage on this blog will be a bit different than it was before, I think you’ll find that I still provide the fights with the coverage they deserve.

Thanks again for supporting me in 2013 and here’s hoping for a very happy New Year!